Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

‘Not really,’ she says.

She keeps glancing at the hotel entrance, and Michael, noticing, eyeing her goosepimples, says, ‘Do you want to wait inside? Are you cold?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I just want to get going.’

‘Me too,’ says Michael. ‘I want to be on the plane.’

Monica says nothing. She looks up at the overcast sky.

From her seat near the back of the bus, Monica watches the door, flinching at every thin body glimpsed through the window, every bald head ducking on entering.

‘Are you looking for your friend?’ asks Michael. ‘Is he supposed to be on this bus?’

‘He’s not really my friend,’ says Monica.

Even when people stop boarding, the bus waits. Eventually, the engine is switched on. The bus idles, spewing fumes, before slowly pulling away from the kerb, and Monica relaxes into her seat.

She pictures Stanley sitting in the bathroom, reading Michael’s blockbuster. She knows she has only delayed him, and that when he is found, he will just take another flight, but Barbados is big enough, although she will no doubt find herself looking over her shoulder, never feeling quite at ease, preferring to stay in the hotel. Their paths won’t cross on the return journey because Stanley will go home after two weeks but they are staying for three. And he doesn’t know where they live. With any luck, she will never see him again.

They head for the airport, picking up speed.

It is raining as they cross the tarmac. They hurry towards the plane, running for cover as if the raindrops were a hail of bullets.

They climb the metal staircase. At the top, a stewardess greets them warmly without making eye contact. The cabin smells peachy. They have sprayed something, thinks Monica, to mask the smell of sick.

They slip into their seats and fasten their seatbelts. Monica turns to the rain-spattered window, peering anxiously out. Michael says, ‘You’re like the man in The Twilight Zone who sees a gremlin on the wing of the plane. Are you worried?’

Beta blockers, thinks Monica. She would like beta blockers to numb her to this, the awfulness of this flight.

‘I’ll be all right,’ she says, ‘once we’re in the air.’

Passengers continue to board and she watches their unhurried search for their seats, their dithering over what to put in the lockers, the aisles clogging.

Michael inspects the contents of the pocket on the back of the seat in front — laminated emergency instructions, cartoons of people dealing calmly with disaster, and an in-flight magazine through which he leafs, browsing photographs of other destinations they might have chosen.

Monica watches another plane taxiing down the wet runway. The backs of her legs are itching against the seat fabric. She is hours away from her next tablet.

Michael reaches for Monica’s bag and hunts through it. ‘Where’s my book?’ he says.

Monica goes through the motions of looking through the bag herself. ‘I don’t think it’s here.’

‘You said you’d picked it up.’

‘I thought I did.’ She is still searching, although pointlessly, there being barely anything in the bag to hunt through. She doesn’t turn to look at him, knowing that if she does she will find him looking at her as if she is crazy. In the end, she shrugs and apologises. She takes out the magazine she has bought and yesterday’s bottle of water. As she unscrews the lid and lifts the bottle to her mouth, her hand is shaking.

Michael sighs. ‘We should be going soon,’ he says. He looks at his watch. ‘We should have gone already.’ Monica opens her magazine to a centre spread of women with circles around the sweat patches under their arms.

There is a disturbance towards the front of the plane and she looks up to see the faltering smile of the stewardess at the door, and Michael says, ‘Is that your friend?’

In the small hours, Peter wakes. He listens, wondering if his wife is in her bed yet or if she is still downstairs. On other nights, he has heard her laughing and has thought to himself that she never laughed like that before her brother arrived; or he has heard the guitar music the brother plays with his long fingernails; or he has been woken by the sound of the brother pissing like a racehorse in the bathroom.

The brother turned up with a guitar and an overnight bag more than a month ago. They used to have a spare room but Peter’s wife sleeps in there now so they put her brother in the lounge. It smells of him, of his unmade bed, his unwashed clothes.

Every evening, after dinner in the kitchen, Peter excuses himself from the table, leaving the two of them talking. The brother does not speak English. Neither did Peter’s wife when he first met her, in the canteen of the local college where she was taking a beginners’ class. She was attractive, friendly, keen, but there were months of canteen coffee and dates before they went back to her flat. He remembers her bedroom, her overwhelming perfume, her straddling him, seeming huge above him in the dark room. He did not know where to put his hands and wondered afterwards whether he had touched her at all.

Peter doesn’t understand a word they say, but if he asks his wife what they talk about she tells him.

‘You have holes in the walls of your public toilets.’

‘Holes?’

‘So that two people can have sex without seeing one another.’

‘Oh.’

‘A man can put himself through a hole and receive sex. But he doesn’t know who is on the other side. He hopes it is someone who will give him pleasure.’

Peter is always the first to go to bed and the first to get up in the morning. He potters about in the kitchen for hours until the brother appears wearing his bed sheet like a toga, greeting Peter with a warm hand on the back of his neck, or on the curve where his neck meets his shoulder, squeezing slightly, and Peter feels those long fingernails digging into his skin.

Peter is thinking of saying to his wife that maybe it’s time her brother was moving on.

‘You also have holes between the booths in your adult video stores.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. If you want to do something to the other man, you put your finger through the hole.’

‘Your finger?’

‘That’s how you invite him to put himself through. If he does, you can do something to him.’

Peter’s evening class was in creative writing, but he did not complete the course. His characters — who always seemed to be waiting for something, for a train, a phone call, a knock at the door, and to whom something was inevitably going to happen — made him anxious. He left these stories unfinished and hasn’t written since, although he has been thinking about trying again.

Someone is coming up the stairs. Peter could just stay where he is, warm in his bed, but he is getting out, slowly crossing the room in the dark, hesitating for a moment before opening the door.

Reaching the top of the stairs, turning to look when Peter’s bedroom door opens, is the brother. He is naked, scratching himself with those long fingernails which Peter feels on the back of his neck every morning, which he feels digging into his skin, even now.

Every day, Mark swims a mile of front crawl. He swallows a lot of swimming pool water and gets out with chlorine in his gut, his bladder bursting. There used to be disinfectant to paddle through on the way to the changing room, but that has gone. He takes a hot shower before heading home.